This is, roughly, the American position today, as it was the position of the Red Indian, when the white man came, and of the Aztec and of the Peruvian. So far as we can make out, neither Redskin nor Aztec nor Inca had any conception of a “good” God. They conceived of implacable, indomitable Powers, which is very different. And that seems to me the essential American position today. Of course the white American believes that man should behave in a kind and benevolent manner. But this is a social belief and a social gesture, rather than an individual flow. The flow from the heart, the warmth of fellow-feeling which has animated Europe and been the best of her humanity, individual, spontaneous, flowing in thousands of little passionate currents often conflicting, this seems unable to persist on the American soil. Instead you get the social creed of benevolence and uniformity, a mass will, and an inward individual retraction, an isolation, an amorphous separateness like grains of sand, each grain isolated upon its own will, its own indomitable- ness, its own implacability, its own unyielding, yet heaped together with all the other grains. This makes the American mass the easiest mass in the world to rouse, to move. And probably, under a long stress, it would make it the most difficult mass in the world to hold together.
The deep psychic change which we call the breaking of the heart, the collapse of the flow of spontaneous warmth between a man and his fellows, happens of course now all over the world. It seems to have happened to Russia in one great blow. It brings a people into a much more complete social unison, for good or evil. But it throws them apart in their private, individual emotions. Before, they were like cells in a complex tissue, alive and functioning diversely in a vast organism composed of family, clan, village, nation. Now, they are like grains of sand, friable, heaped together in a vast inorganic democracy.
While the old sympathetic flow continues, there are violent hostilities between people, but they are not secretly repugnant to one another. Once the heart is broken, people become repulsive to one another, secretly, and they develop social benevolence. They smell in each other’s nostrils. It has been said often enough of more primitive or old-world peoples, who live together in a state of blind mistrust but also of close physical connexion with one another, that they have no noses. They are so close, the flow from body to body is so powerful, that they hardly smell one another, and hardly are aware at all of offensive human odours that madden the new civilizations. As it says in this novel: The American senses other people by their sweat and their kitchens. By which he means, their repulsive effluvia. And this is basically true. Once the blood-sympathy breaks, and only the nerve-sympathy is left, human beings become secretly intensely repulsive to one another, physically, and sympathetic only mentally and spiritually. The secret physical repulsion between people is responsible for the perfection of American “plumbing,” American sanitation, and American kitchens, utterly white-enamelled and antiseptic. It is revealed in the awful advertisements such as those about “halitosis,” or bad breath. It is responsible for the American nausea at coughing, spitting, or any of those things. The American townships don’t mind hideous litter of tin cans and paper and broken rubbish. But they go crazy at the sight of human excrement.
And it is this repulsion from the physical neighbour that is now coming up in the consciousness of the great democracies, in England, America, Germany. The old flow broken, men could enlarge themselves for a while in transcendentalism, Whitmanish “adhesiveness” of the social creature, noble supermen, lifted above the baser functions. For the last hundred years man has been elevating himself above his “baser functions” and posing around as a transcendentalism a superman, a perfect social being, a spiritual entity. And now, since the war, the collapse has come.
Man has no ultimate control of his own consciousness. If his nose doesn’t notice stinks, it just doesn’t, and there’s the end of it. If his nose is so sensitive that a stink overpowers him, then again he’s helpless. He can’t prevent his senses from transmitting and his mind from registering what it does register.
And now, man has begun to be overwhelmingly conscious of the repulsiveness of his neighbour, particularly of the physical repul- siveness. There it is, in James Joyce, in Aldous Huxley, in Andre Gide, in modern Italian novels like Parigi — in all the very modern novels, the dominant note is the repulsiveness, intimate physical repulsiveness of human flesh. It is the expression of absolutely genuine experience. What the young feel intensely, and no longer so secretly, is the extreme repulsiveness of other people.
It is, perhaps, the inevitable result of the transcendental bodiless brotherliness and social “adhesiveness” of the last hundred years. People rose superior to their bodies, and soared along, till they had exhausted their energy in this performance. The energy once exhausted, they fell with a struggling plunge, not down into their bodies again, but into the cesspools of the body.
The modern novel, the very modern novel, has passed quite away from tragedy. An American novel like Manhattan Transfer has in it still the last notes of tragedy, the sheer spirit of suicide. An English novel like Point Counter Point has gone beyond tragedy into exacerbation, and continuous nervous repulsion. Man is so nervously repulsive to man, so screamingly, nerve-rackingly repulsive! This novel goes one further. Man just smells, offensively and unbearably, not to be borne. The human stink!
The inward revulsion of man away from man, which follows on the collapse of the physical sympathetic flow, has a slowly increasing momentum, a wider and wider swing. For a long time, the social belief and benevolence of man towards man keeps pace with the secret physical repulsion of man away from man. But ultimately, inevitably, the one outstrips the other. The benevolence exhausts itself, the repulsion only deepens. The benevolence is external and extra-individual. But the revulsion is inward and personal. The one gains over the other. Then you get a gruesome condition, such as is displayed in this book.
The only motive power left is the sense of revulsion away from people, the sense of the repulsiveness of the neighbour. It is a condition we are rapidly coming to — a condition displayed by the intellectuals much more than by the common people. Wyndham Lewis gives a display of the utterly repulsive effect people have on him, but he retreats into the intellect to make his display. It is a question of manner and manners. The effect is the same. It is the same exclamation: They stink! My God, they stink!
And in this process of recoil and revulsion, the affective consciousness withers with amazing rapidity. Nothing I have ever read has astonished me more than the “orphanage” chapters of this book. There I realized with amazement how rapidly the human psyche can strip itself of its awarenesses and its emotional contacts, and reduce itself to a sub-brutal condition of simple gross persistence. It is not animality — far from it. Those boys are much less than animals. They are cold wills functioning with a minimum of consciousness. The amount that they are not aware of is perhaps the most amazing aspect of their character. They are brutally and deliberately unaware. They have no hopes, no desires even. They have even no will-to-exist, for existence even is too high a term. They have a strange, stony will-to-persist, that is all. And they persist by reaction, because they still feel the repulsiveness of each other, of everything, even of themselves.
Of course the author exaggerates. The boy Lorry “always had his nose in a book’ — and he must have got tilings out of the books. If he had taken the intellectual line, like Mr. Huxley or Mr. Wyndham Lewis, he would have harped on the intellectual themes, the essential feeling being the same. But he takes the non-intellectual line, is in revulsion against the intellect too, so we have the stark reduction to a persistent minimum of the human consciousness. It is a minimum lower than the savage, lower than the African Bushman. Because it is a willed minimum, sustained from inside by resistance, brute resistance against any flow of consciousness except that of the barest, most brutal egoistic self-interest. It is a phenomenon, and pre-eminently an American phenomenon. But the flow of repulsion, inward physical revulsion of man away from man, is passin
g over all the world. It is only perhaps in America, and in a book such as this, that we see it most starkly revealed.
After the orphanage, the essential theme is repeated over a wider field. The state of revulsion continues. The young Lorry is indomitable. You can’t destroy him. And at the same time, you can’t catch him. He will recoil from everything, and nothing on earth will make him have a positive feeling, of affection or sympathy or connexion. His mother? — we see her in her decaying repulsiveness. He has a certain loyalty, because she is his sort: it is part of his will- to-persist. But he must turn his back on her with a certain disgust.
The tragedian, like Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson, still dramatizes his defeat and is in love with himself in his defeated role. But the Lorry Lewis is in too deep a state of revulsion to dramatize himself. He almost deliberately finds himself repulsive too. And he goes on, just to see if he can hit the world without destroying himself. Hit the world not to destroy it, but to experience in himself how repulsive it is.
Kansas City; Beatrice, Nebraska; Omaha; Salt Lake City; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles, he finds them all alike, nothing if not repulsive. He covers the great tracts of prairie, mountain, forest, coast-range, without seeing anything but a certain desert scaliness. His consciousness is resistant, shuts things out, and reduces itself to a minimum.
In the Y.M.C.A. it is the same. He has his gang. But the last word about them is that they stink, their effluvia is offensive. He goes with women, but the thought of women is inseparable from the thought of sexual disease and infection. He thrills to the repulsiveness of it, in a terrified, perverted way. His associates — which means himself also — read Zarathustra and Spinoza, Darwin and Hegel. But it is with a strange external, superficial mind that has no connexion with the affective and effective self. One last desire he has — to write, to put down his condition in words. His will-to-persist is intellectual also. Beyond this, nothing.
It is a genuine book, as far as it goes, even if it is an objectionable one. It is, in psychic disintegration, a good many stages ahead of Point Counter Point. It reveals a condition that not many of us have reached, but towards which the trend of consciousness is taking us, all of us, especially the young. It is, let us hope, a ne plus ultra. The next step is legal insanity, or just crime. The book is perfectly sane: yet two more strides, and it is criminal insanity. The style seems to me excellent, fitting the matter. It is sheer bottom-dog style, the bottom-dog mind expressing itself direct, almost as if it barked. That directness, that unsentimental and non-dramatized thoroughness of setting down the under-dog mind surpasses anything I know. I don’t want to read any more books like this. But I am glad to have read this one, just to know what is the last word in repulsive consciousness, consciousness in a state of repulsion. It helps one to understand the world, and saves one the necessity of having to follow out the phenomenon of physical repulsion any further, for the time being.
The Story of Doctor Manente, by A. F. Grazzini
It is rather by accident than design that The Story of Doctor Manente should be the first book to appear in this Lungarno Series. Yet the accident is also fortunate, since it would be difficult to find a work more typical of the times. It is true, Lasca was not a sensitive genius like Boccaccio: but then the Renaissance was by no means a sensitive period. Boccaccio was far lovelier than the ordinary, or even than most extraordinary men of his day. Whereas Lasca is of the day and of the city, and as such, as a local and temporal writer, he is a typical Florentine.
Again, this famous story is a magnificent account of what is perhaps the best Florentine beffa, or burla (practical joke) on record. The work is a novella, a short novel, composed of various parts which fit together with the greatest skill. In this respect the story is far superior to most of Boccaccio’s long novelle, which are full of unnecessary stuff, often tedious. Here we are kept sharp to essentials, and yet we are given a complete and living atmosphere. Anyone who knows Florence today can picture the whole thing perfectly, the big complicated palazzi with far-off attics and hidden chambers, the inns of the country where men sit on benches outside, and drink and talk on into the night, the houses with the little courtyards at the back, where everybody looks out of the window and knows all about everybody’s affairs. The presentation of the story is masterly, and could hardly be bettered, setting a pattern for later works. In character, each man is himself. One can see the sly, frail Lorenzo playing this rather monstrous joke. One can see Doctor Manente through and through. The Grand Vicar, so authoritative and easily cowed, what a fine picture of an Italian inquisitor, how different from the Spanish type! The people are people, they are Italians and Florentines, absolutely. There they are, in their own ordinary daylight, not lifted into the special gleam of poetry, as Boccaccio’s people so often are. And we have to admit, if Boccaccio is more universal, Lasca is more Tuscan. The Italians are, when you come down to it, peculiarly terre a terre, right down on the earth. It is part of their wholesome charm. But the rather fantastic side of their nature sometimes makes them want to be angels or winged lions or soaring eagles, and then they are often ridiculous, though occasionally sublime. But the people itself is of the earth, wholesomely and soundly so, and unless perverted, will remain so. The great artists were wild coruscations which shone and expired. The people remains the people, and wine and spaghetti are their forms of poetry: good forms too. The peasants who bargain every Friday, year in, year out, in the Piazza della Signoria, where the great white statue of Michelangelo’s David stands livid, have never even heard of the name David. If you say to them: My name is David, they say: What? To them it is no name. Their outward-roaming consciousness has never even roamed so far as to read the name of the statue they almost touch each Friday. Inquiry is not dieir affair. They are centripetal.
And that is Italian. This soaring people sticks absolutely to the earth, and keeps the strength of the earth. The cities may go mad; they do. But the real Italian people is on the earth, and the cities will never lift them up. The bulk of the Italian people will never be “interested.” They are centripetal, and only the little currents near to them matter.
So Doctor Manente! His courage and his force of life under all his trial are wonderful. Think of the howls, laments, prayers, sighs, and recriminations the northerner would have raised, under the circumstances. Not so the Doctor! He refuses to take an objective view of his mishaps, he refuses to think, but eats and drinks handsomely, sleeps, builds castles in the air, and sings songs, even improvising. We feel, when he comes back into the world, he is still good and fat. Mental torture has not undermined him. He has refused to think, and so saved himself the worst suffering. And how can we fail to admire the superb earthly life-courage which this reveals! It is the strength and courage of trees, deep rooted in substance, in substantial earth, and centripetal. So the Italian is, really, rooted in substance, not in dreams, ideas, or ideals, but physically self-centred, like a tree.
But the Italian also gets stuck sometimes, in this self-centred physicality of his nature, and occasionally has wild revolts from it. Then you get the sombre curses of Dante, the torments of Michelangelo and Leonardo, the sexless flights of Fra Angelico and Botticelli, the anguish of the idealists. The Italian at his best doesn’t quarrel with substance on behalf of his soul or his spirit. When he does, you see strange results.
Among which are the famous burle, or befle of the Renaissance period: the famous and infamous practical jokes. Apparently the Florentines actually did play these cruel jokes on one another, all the time: it was a common sport. It is so even in Boccaccio, though we feel that he was too true a poet really to appreciate the game. Lasca, who was a real Florentine of the town and taverns, was in heaven when there was a good, cruel joke being perpetrated. Lorenzo de’ Medici, who writes so touchingly of the violet, did actually play these pranks on his acquaintances — and if this is not a true story, historically it might just as well be so. The portrait of Lorenzo given here is true to life: that even the most g
entle modern Italian critics admit. But they deny the story any historical truth; on very insufficient grounds, really. The modern mind, however, dislikes the befja, and would like to think it never really existed. “Of course Lorenzo never really played this trick.” But the chances are that he did. And denying the historical truth of every recorded beffa does not wipe the befja out of existence. On the contrary, it only leaves us blind to the real Renaissance spirit in Italy.
If every exalted soul who stares at Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca, were compelled at the same time to study the practical-joke stories which play around the figures of these men and which fill the background of the great artists, then we should have a considerable change in feeling when we visited the Uffizi Gallery. We might be a little less exalted: we should certainly be more amused and more on the spot, instead of floating in the vapour of ecstasized admiration.
The befja is real, the befja is earnest, and what in heaven was its goal? We can only understand it, I think, if we remember the true substantial, terre a terre nature of the Italian. This self-centred physical nature can become crude, gross, even bestial and monstrous. We see it in d’Annunzio’s peasant stories. We see it in the act of that Gonzaga of Mantua (if I remember right) who met his only son walking near the palace, and because the child did not salute with sufficient obsequiousness, kicked the boy ferociously in the groin, so that he died. The two centuries preceding the Renaissance had been full of such ferocity, beastliness. The spirit of Tuscany recoiled against it, and used every weapon of wit and intelligence against the egoistic brute of the preceding ages. And Italy is always having these periods of self-shame and recoil, not always into wit and fine intelligence, often into squeamish silliness. Indeed the Renaissance itself fizzled out into silly squeamishness, even in Lasca’s day.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 1024